How to evaluate a blog – Part 8:
Graphical Presentation

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While most of the previous blog evaluation criteria were pretty objective, we now move into a much more “touchy & feely” area: the aesthetical presentation of a blog. Website graphics are a means, and not a goal by themselves. Graphics support the purpose of the site. They can emphasize areas, group different topics together, give [...]

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How to evaluate a blog – Part 7:
SEO or Search Engine Optimization

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Do the test yourself: Google the main keywords which should be relevant to the blog you are evaluating. Does the blog feature on the first search page? If so, cool! That’s what we want! How about Googling a key phrase, or key title, or some key issues which have been well covered in the blog [...]

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Social media in rural Africa

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We are never too old to learn. This morning, I was participating in a session at the AgKnowledge Africa share fair in Addis, on “How to report on agriculture issues”. One presenter introduced his experiences as a radio reporter, where he travels around interviewing farmers on the diverse aspects of their daily life, their problems [...]

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How to explain “social media” in 60 minutes

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Remember the shout-out post I wrote a couple of months ago, asking for social media volunteers at the AgKnowledge Africa Share Fair in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia? Well, over forty volunteers raised their hand, and invested a fair share of their time and expertise in putting the social media strategy together to cover the four days [...]

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How to evaluate a blog – Part 6: Speed

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The download speed of the home page, and the individual pages on a blog are important. Internet users are an impatient bunch. Even if they have a good Internet connection, people will not wait for a page to download for more than 30 seconds. Often we forget not everyone uses high-speed connections. Pages of 1 [...]

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What’s the ROI of social media?

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An excellent slideshow on the Return On Investment of social media Olivier Blanchard Basics Of Social Media Roi View more presentations from Olivier Blanchard. Slideshow discovered via Jeff Bullas

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How to evaluate a blog – Part 5:
The user experience

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“User experience” or “Usability” is a big word for webmasters and serious bloggers. It is all – as many things while evaluating a blog or a website- all about “putting yourself in the shoes of your visitors”. In this part of our evaluation series, I will restrict our analysis to the key points of “How [...]

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How to evaluate a blog – Part 4:
The use of real estate

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After questions, numbers and first impressions, we are gradually moving into the technical part of our blog evaluation series. Let’s start with the most important piece first: “the blog’s real estate” or “how are the different bits of information used to build the blog”. A blog cramps a massive amount of data onto a small [...]

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How to evaluate a blog – Part 3:
First impressions

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In the previous parts, we have explored mostly “the environment” of the blog. From the blogmaster, we got all the information of the blog’s setup, its purpose, what they want out of the evaluation,… In the second step of the evaluation, we looked at the Google Analytics figures to find areas for improvement aided by [...]

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GoDaddy sites hacked again

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After the massive hacks injecting malware into shared hosted sites from several providers back in April and May, it seems they are back at work. Many sites hosted by GoDaddy are being hacked at the moment I am writing this post. Two of mine were affected an hour ago. Update: Hit again this morning (Sept [...]

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How to evaluate a blog – Part 2:
Check the numbers

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We can discuss blog statistics, visitor trending and referral patterns for days and on end. We don’t need too many figures for a general blog evaluation: only the basic traffic statistics will already give us a good view of: the blog and visitors’ profiles, and a trend over time. The main purpose of this exercise [...]

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